Naples, Past and PresentNorway, Arthur H. (Arthur Hamilton)
History
Naples, Past and Present
Norway, Arthur H. (Arthur Hamilton)
Naples (Italy) -- Description and travel
I shall return again to King Alfonso and his family, for the city is
full of memories of them, and in the vaults of the Castel Nuovo there
are things once animate which throw a terrible light upon the
practices of the House of Aragon. But for the time this may be enough
of horrors; and I turn with pleasure to the long sea-front against
which the tide is breaking fresh and pleasantly, surging white and
foaming over the black rocks which skirt the foot of the sea-wall. The
wind comes freshly out of the east. Capri is growing into a wonderful
clearness. Even the little town upon the saddle of the island begins
to glow white and sparkling, and the limestone precipices show their
clefts and shadows in the increasing light. The soft wind blows in
little sunny gusts, which shake the blossoms of wistaria on the
house-fronts, mingling the salt and fishy odours of the beach with the
scent of flowers in the villa gardens. There is scarce a sign of cloud
in the warm sky, and all the crescent bay between me and the city
takes colours which are perpetually changing into deeper tints of
liquid blue and rare soft green, with flashes here and there of brown,
and exquisite reflections which are but half seen before they yield to
others no less beautiful. The long white sea-wall gleams like the
setting of a gem, and the warm air trembles slightly in the distance,
so that the Castle of the Egg looks as if it were indeed enchanted,
and might be near the doom predicted for it when its frail foundations
shall be broken.
I had meant to spend an hour this morning in the Church of Sannazzaro,
on the slope of the hill, at no great distance from this spot. He who
does not see churches betimes in Naples may chance to miss them
altogether, and will waste much temper during the hot afternoon in
hammering on barred doors with vain effort to rouse sleepy sacristans.
Heaven knows I am not indifferent to church architecture, and had the
morning been less beautiful I should certainly have described
learnedly enough, the building preserving the memory of the quaint and
artificial poet whom Bembo, as frigid and unnatural as himself,
declared to be next to Virgil in fame, as he was also next in
sepulture. I often wonder whether Bembo really meant anything at all
by this judgment, except an elegant turn of verse. If he did--But I am
straying away from the lights and shadows of this magic morning, which
are far more delightful than the arcadian rhapsodies of Sannazzaro and
of Bembo. Let me put them both aside. Or stay, one observation of the
former comes into mind. He said the Mergellina was "Un pezzo di cielo
caduto in terra"--a scrap of heaven fallen down on earth. He had blood
in him, then, this worshipper of nymphs and classicism; let us go and
see his Mergellina. It will not take us far from the sea-front, to
which it once lay open, in the days when there were no grand hotels
nor ugly boarding-houses blocking out the sweet colours and the clean
air of the sea.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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